Because the person in the Violinist Thought Experiment is
kidnapped and connected to the violinist against her will, the story might be
said to be most similar to pregnancies resulting from rape.[1]

This suggests that, even if a pro-life person is convinced
by the Violinist Analogy that abortion is permissible in the case of rape, he
could still maintain that it is otherwise immoral.

But Thomson offers a challenge to those who say (a) in
general, the Right to Life Argument works to show that abortion is wrong, but
(b) abortion is permissible in the case of rape:

Can
those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make an exception for a
pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that persons have a right to
life only if they didn’t come into existence because of rape; or they can say
that all persons have a right to life, but that some have less of a right to
life than others, in particular, that those who came into existence because of
rape have less. But these statements have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely
the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you
have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you are the product of a
rape. (RTD 90)

In summary, Thomson’s challenge is this:

•If all fetuses are persons with a right to life, then fetuses conceived
in rape are persons with a right to life.

•So if abortion is wrong because a fetus is a person whose right to
life always outweighs the right to bodily control, then abortion is wrong
even in the case of rape.

But Thomson’s view is that abortion is permissible (not
wrong) in the case of rape, and so even if fetuses are persons with the right
to life, that fact alone does not establish that abortion is wrong.

[6.4.] Staying Attached is Supererogatory.

While you would be doing something above and beyond the call
of moral duty if you were to stay attached to the violinist, you are not doing anything
wrong by detaching yourself.

In other words, staying attached to the violinist would be supererogatory,
not obligatory.

[6.4.1.] Interlude: Moral Categories.

There are two main moral categories and three
sub-categories into which a given action can be sorted:

a. immoral(df.): not permitted by morality;
morally bad; in performing the action, you are doing something morally wrong.

b. morally permissible (df.): permitted by
morality; in performing the action, you are not doing anything immoral. There
are three sub-categories of morally permissible action: obligatory,
morally neutral, and supererogatory:

c. obligatory
(df.): required by morality; if you don’t do it, then you’ve done something
immoral

e. supererogatory
(df.): going beyond what morality requires in order to do something especially
good; you are not obligated to do it, so failing to do it would not be immoral;
but if you do it, you’ve done something morally good and deserve praise.

[6.5.] Lessons about the Right to Life.

Over the course of the article, Thomson draws two lessons from
this story:

1.The
right to life is not the right to use someone else’s body to stay alive
(“...having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be
given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s
body—even if one needs it for life itself.” RTD 95).Because the
violinist is a person, he has a right to life. But this does not imply that he
has a right to use your body in order to stay alive. If he did have a
right to use your body in order to stay alive, then that right might outweigh
your right to determine what happens to your body. But having a right to life does
not imply having a right to use someone else’s body to stay alive—so that
right does not necessarily trump your right to determine what happens in your
body.

She further illustrates this point
with the Henry Fonda thought-experiment:

If I
am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of
Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same, I have no right
to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It might
be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it. It
would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the
West Coast and carried Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all
against anybody that he should do this for me. (RTD 94)

If the violinist required, not nine
months of your time, but only a single hour, he still would not have
a right to use your body, and so you would not be violating his rights by
disconnecting. Thomson concedes that in this situation, it might be immoral in
some other way for you to disconnect. You might be “self-centered,
callous, indecent” if you refuse to stay connected for an hour; but you
would not be violating any rights the violinist has to your body—because he has
no such rights.

Applied to abortion, the lesson is
this: even if the fetus has a right to life, this does not automatically
give it the right to use your body to stay alive.

2.The
right to life is not the right not to be killed; it is the right not to
be killed unjustly. (RTD 95)

Suppose that you have to spend nine
years in bed in order to save the life of the violinist. According to
Thomson, if you disconnect from him, you are killing him, but you are not
killing him unjustly. This is true despite the fact that he has a right
to life, just like any other person.

Applied to abortion, the lesson is
this: the pro-lifer needs to show not just that abortion is killing, but
that it is unjust killing. From the fact that a fetus has a right to
life it does not follow that it has a right not to be killed—it only follows
that it has a right not to be killed unjustly. So the critic of
abortion needs to show that abortion is unjust killing… that in
depriving it of the use of the mother’s body, we are depriving it of something
to which it has been given a right.

In the case of pregnancy due to rape, the mother has not
extended the right to use her body to the fetus. She is not responsible for
the fetus’s presence in her body; she did not “invite” it in. And so in
depriving it of the use of her body, she is not depriving it of anything to
which it has a right. Therefore, abortion in the case of
pregnancy-due-to-rape is not unjust killing.

[6.6.] The People Seed Thought-Experiment.

Thomson gives other analogies to support the claim that it is
morally permissible for a woman to abort a pregnancy that she had attempted to
prevent with contraceptives. One of these is the people seed analogy:

Imagine that “people-seeds drift
about in the air like pollen” (RTD 97). If one is blown into your house through
an open window and lands on your sofa or in your carpet, it will grow into a
person for whom you will have to care. You want your windows open, but you don’t
want a person growing on your couch, so you install window screens.
Unfortunately, one of these screens fails, and a seed ends up on your couch and
grows into a person. Does this person now have the right to use your house?

Thomson says that it is morally
permissible for you to force this person to leave, that he or she does not have
a right to stay in your home.

She takes this case to imply that in
cases of unwanted pregnancies stemming from sex using failed contraception, the
fetus does not have a right to the continued use of the mother’s body.

Thomson considers an objection—we can call it the Responsibility
Objection: “Someone may argue that you are responsible for its [i.e., the
people seed’s] rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after
all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture,
or with sealed windows and doors.” (RTD 97)

Thomson offers two responses to the Responsibility
Objection:

Response #1:

But
this won’t do—for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by
having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!)
army. (RTD 97)

·In other words, the Responsibility Objection assumes the
following:

If doing x would have guaranteed
that you wouldn’t become pregnant,

and you chose not do x and then
became pregnant, then

you are responsible for the
pregnancy and so it is immoral to abort it.

·But this assumption is false: it implies that it is
immoral to abort a pregnancy-by-rape that you could have prevented by just
staying home, or by not leaving the house without someone to protect you.

Response #2:

Surely
we do not have [a] “special responsibility” for a person unless we have assumed
it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent
pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, and then at the time of birth of the
child do not put it out for adoption, but rather take it home with them, then
they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they
cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they
now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all
reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of
their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a
special responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for
it, or they may not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming
responsibility for it would require large sacrifices, then they may
refuse. (102-103)

Stopping point for Wednesday
February 25. For next time, study today’s lecture notes, and read all of EMP
ch.7

[1] The majority of abortions
performed in the U.S. are not abortions of pregnancies resulting from rape. In
2012, “the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) released
a statement [according to which] ‘[e]ach year in the U.S., 10,000-15,000
abortions occur among women whose pregnancies are a result of reported rape or
incest.’” “Todd Akin Challenged by Doctors on Rape and Pregnancy,” ABC News,
August 21, 2012, URL = < http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/08/21/todd-akin-challenged-by-doctors-on-rape-and-pregnancy/>, retrieved May 3, 2013. (Of course, it is possible that this figure
is too low because not all women who abort pregnancies that are in fact due to
rape or incest report that this is the case.) What percentage of the total
number of abortions is this? The latest government statistics on abortion are
from 2011. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), during that year
730,322legal abortions were performed in the United States.
Presumably, this figure is lower than the actual number, since states aren’t required
to report these numbers to the CDC, and the figure cited does not include
numbers from four states (California, Maryland, and New Hampshire). (“Abortion
Surveillance: United States, 2011,” Centers for Disease Control, URL =
< http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6311a1.htm?s_cid=ss6311a1_w>, retrieved February 27, 2015.) Combining the two figures yields
the result that legal abortions due to rapeaccount for
no more than 1.3-2% of legal abortions in the US each year.